The everyday consumer practice of seeking local merchants via Mobile Search is exploding all over the search-scape. It's growing faster than even the experts expected.

To put this in perspective, we recall the early days of the Internet when the growth-curve was measured in terms of Internet time vs. Real time. Typically, back then, it was generally agreed that 'the Internet' was advancing at three times the speed of real time.

In other words, the amount of innovation and adaptation that normally took about three years in the real world was taking only a year or less on the Internet. That meant that, theoretically, in 4 years of Internet time, we'd experienced the amount of change that would normally take 12 years of 'real' time in the 'real' world. Or so the thinking went.

In retrospect, we think they may have greatly underestimated the speed of innovation. This seems especially true when we view in hindsight the degree to which to whole world, and especially commerce, has so dramatically advanced as a result of embracing this new technology.

So, why is this important? ...because it is happening again. With the inevitable wholesale adoption of smartphones, we see the pace of change powered by these amazing mobile devices to be even faster than back in the days when the Internet outpaced the so called real world by only 3 to 1.

In the early days of the Internet, most companies were slow to embrace the new technology. But this time around, the race is on steroids! Mobile search via smartphone is being juiced by big business and exploited by an army of entrepreneurial programmers and App developers. And these factors are working together to accelerate the pace of change at a rate that greatly exceeds the remarkable growth curve of the early Internet. Back then everything was limited by the capacity of dial-up connections, desktop computers, a...